Americans rank Kenya ‘worse’ place to visit than North Korea

Posted on Mar 18, 2017
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Americans have ranked North Korea, a country once declared an axis of evil, as a better place to visit than Kenya.

This is according to data used from Priceonomics customer which was borrowed from the State Department. The State Department issues dozens of advisories with the intent of keeping Americans safe as they travel abroad.

The State Department also determines warnings and by actual deaths which countries are targeted by these advisories, and what risks Americans face by visiting these countries.

Out of 25 countries that have had warnings, Kenya was tied at position eight with Lebanon and the Philippines, only beating Mali, Nigeria, Algeria, Burundi and Central African Republic n Africa.

The data found that Mexico, Mali, and Israel have been targeted by the most travel advisories in recent years, but that Americans are more likely to face life-threatening danger in Thailand, Pakistan, and Honduras.

TRAVEL WARNINGS

The State Department has multiple mechanisms for advising American travelers, but they focused just on travel warnings.

They filtered out warnings that had been issued for natural disasters, then ranked countries based on the number of travel warnings issued against them in an 8-year period between 2009 and 2017. Mexico tops the list with 28 warnings in an 8-year period.

Other countries on the ranking are participants in ongoing international conflicts for example Israel, Pakistan and Afghanistan, or are sites in which extremist groups regularly carry out terrorist attacks as is the case for Mali, Nigeria and Syria.

North Korea is an interesting exception, as the government itself presents a danger to American travelers. According to the State Department, foreigners are liable to be jailed for unspecified reasons, or for seemingly innocuous infractions like interacting with the locals or taking unauthorized photos.

But in a different ranking where Americans were killed between 2009 and 2016 by the foreigners, Kenya was not ranked. The data was filtered to include only homicides, executions, deaths in terrorist attacks, and drug-related deaths.